At least 43 people have been sent for quarantine after a frozen-food sample in China’s Heilongjiang province tested positive for the Covid-19, local authorities said.
On Saturday, the authorities in the provincial capital of Harbin launched an emergency response after a third-party inspection agency found the frozen-food sample from a local trading company that tested positive for the virus the previous day, Xinhua news agency reported.
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As of 5 p.m. Saturday, 43 close contacts had been quarantined in designated places and 109 were under observation at home, according to the Harbin epidemic response headquarters.
A total of 1,350 samples from these people, food products and the surrounding environment have been taken.
The 989 samples tested so far all showed negative results.
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Authorities have disinfected and sealed off the processing and storage facilities of the frozen-food products and sealed up the related frozen-food production materials and semi-finished products.
They are also tracking the infection source of the virus.
Also on Saturday, authorities in Yaodu district in the city of Linfen, Shanxi province, announced that the outer packaging of imported fish product from a local farm-produce market tested positive for the virus.
Saturday’s developments come only a week after authorities in Wuhan, where the novel coronavirus is likely to have originated in December 2019, said that three imported frozen food packaging samples had tested positive for Covid-19.